


9.8 meters per second per second

by cofax



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Gen, On the Run, abuse of ellipses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-10-28
Updated: 1999-10-28
Packaged: 2017-10-07 15:15:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,480
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/66382
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cofax/pseuds/cofax
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Meetings in strange places.  Set at some undefined time after the beginning of season 6.</p>
            </blockquote>





	9.8 meters per second per second

The redheaded woman looked very comfortable as she sat, coffee in hand, on the porch railing in front of the climbing shop at Curry. It was October in Yosemite Valley, late morning; the sun had finally begun to warm the valley floor. The worst of the tourist season was over, but that only meant cars weren't bumper to bumper from one end of the Valley to the other. There were plenty of people around, and most of the campgrounds were still open.

Certainly the climbers were still there. October was near the end of the climbing season in the Valley, with chill nights withering the oaks and turning the aspens yellow, but the days were golden. Some of the climbers would stay in the Valley until the snows fell and the cold granite burned their fingers. The holdouts were the climbing bums who squatted in Sunnyside Campground hard under El Capitan, Sunnyside which they steadfastly continued to call Camp Four in honor of the old days of hob-nailed boots and hemp ropes.

This woman was clearly one of the climbers, happier 300 feet off the deck and scrambling for a gear placement than almost anywhere on the ground. While idly perusing the newest edition of "Accidents in North American Mountaineering," she eyed the tourists wandering by. She looked utterly relaxed, but also watchful, the kind of person who would remember what color shirt someone had worn the day before even if he didn't himself.

She was on the small side, and appeared even smaller in the oversized green sweatpants and fleece jacket she was wearing. Her hands were scabbed, the short nails chipped, and dirty white athletic tape was wrapped around two joints on her left hand. On her feet were the climber's staple, a pair of sport sandals over an extremely large pair of wool socks. The tops of the socks flopped loosely around her ankles, and once in a while she reached down absently to pull one up.

She was very fair, without the leathery tan so common to climbers, but her face was heavily freckled nonetheless. There were crows' feet in the finer skin around her eyes. Like most climbing bums, she was lean, and strong: tendons and ligaments stood out starkly under the pale skin of her forearms. Her hair was fading to strawberry-blond on the top where the sun had bleached it, and curled loosely past her shoulders. Despite her size and her clothing, she wasn't young -- probably on the far side of thirty.

If anyone other than the climbers had been paying attention, they would have known that she'd only been in the Park for six weeks, had come there from two weeks of climbing on the south side of Lake Tahoe. She'd rolled into the Valley on the last night of August in a battered old Toyota pickup, its green bed rusting out and its transmission in a questionable state. Before South Lake Tahoe she had been at Donner Summit, and before then -- before then, anyone who asked would find the trail cold, and muddled. But no one asked. Who pays attention to climbers but other climbers?

***

Dana Scully was no more nervous than usual, as she lingered in public over her small indulgence, a non-fat double latte. She had been in the Park for six weeks now, with no difficulties other than losing her sunglasses on the second pitch of Snake Dike. Dee Stockton's life was simple, easy to inhabit.

Too easy.

She was vaguely disturbed by how smoothly she had adjusted to this, and by how she found a strange renewal in this nomadic existence. It was a life pared down to the essentials: eating beans and rice out of a saucepan heated on a decrepit backpacking stove, washing out her underwear in the restroom sink and hanging it to dry on a branch, and spending days on end with people about whom she knew little other than their first names and what kind of climbing shoe they preferred. It was, she felt, like the best of the old days, without having to worry about picking up dry-cleaning or getting shot.

If Scully had any complaints now, it was that Dee couldn't afford good wine, and that the showers at Camp Four only had about six minutes of hot water in the morning. Well, she had to admit those weren't her only complaints.

She missed her family, her apartment, clean towels.

She even missed Mulder, dammit.

That was a bad sign, given the circumstances under which they had parted. She twitched away the thought, as if wincing from an old scar.

Despite it all, she found herself sleeping better, laughing more, than she had in years. It helped that the last two years had been pretty lousy, and the two months before they ran positively hellish. Dee's life gave her time to settle back into her skin, re-establish herself. She still carried a gun, always did, despite the multitude of federal laws that violated in the Park. She hadn't touched it in weeks however, other than to clean it, hunched carefully in her tent.

She felt safe.

She knew she wasn't.

While Scully waited for word, she made do with Dee Stockton. And it wasn't that bad. Scully loved to climb, loved hanging two rope-lengths above the world, knowing that she could bring her partner up the next pitch with no difficulties. She loved facing and conquering the concrete fears of falling, of exposure, through technique and self-control. It was a long way from the amorphous, metaphysical terrors of working on the X-files.

Now she was stronger than she had ever been, stronger even than she was at Quantico. It would be easy, she thought sometimes, just to drift along, following the VW buses and ancient Hondas to Joshua Tree, and then to Hueco for the winter; then back north with the spring, perhaps to Needles, or the Gunks. The temptation to slide fully into this life was always there, lurking; it got stronger every week.

Tomorrow, she and Lynn would try the Knickerbocker route on Lost Arrow Spire, a climb she had lusted after with a fine and tenacious hunger since the day she had entered the Valley. Today was a rest day: she would drink her coffee, buy groceries, do laundry. If she had time, she would read that mystery Terry had lent her, the one about the Boston detectives, and make pencil checks next to the errors in logic and procedure. Maybe she would sign up for an hour on the one public internet terminal in the Valley, and check six different email accounts for a message.

Or maybe she wouldn't.

It was his gait that caught her attention first; his face was obscured by distance and the trees lining the path from Curry Cabins. A man with a peculiarly graceful, long-legged stride . . . then he turned his head, scanning the passersby covertly as he approached the building, and that single movement released a cascade of memories.

So.

Scully didn't react, didn't appear to notice him as Mulder bought a cup of coffee and sat down at a table several feet away. The table was cluttered with the refuse of someone's early lunch, and he carefully picked through the remains. From her seat on the railing she watched him attempt to coax a squirrel into taking a French fry from his hand. He seemed oblivious to her presence, but he knew she was there. He always knew.

Mulder had changed as well, although not as much as she had. He was wearing jeans and a Gore-tex jacket over a wool sweater. The sweater hung loosely: he had lost weight. His big boots knocked nervously against the boards of the porch as he jiggled his feet. What she could see of his hair was shaggy, longer than it ought to be. He looked like he hadn't shaved in some days.

The fat squirrel, skittish but experienced at this game, danced gingerly towards the cold and greasy lump of reconstituted   
potato. Just before it reached his hands, she spoke.

"You don't want to do that. It just encourages them, and some of them carry disease."

Mulder glanced back at her over his shoulder. "Ah, but where do they carry it?" He sounded like he was flirting with her, but under the battered Red Sox cap his eyes were intent. Scully could tell his pupils were dilated, even from twelve feet away.

Something was wrong. Something other than the obvious.

"Anywhere they want to." She flung herself down from the railing, impatient with the charade. Slinging her knapsack to her shoulder, she stalked past him to throw her empty coffee cup away. On her return, she muttered, "The boulders across from Housekeeping. Seven o'clock."

He didn't respond, but she knew he would be there. He'd come this far, hadn't he?

***

It was full dark in the Valley at seven p.m. Scully settled her headlamp a little more firmly on her forehead and shook her hands   
ruefully. She been climbing on and around this boulder for the past hour, and her forearms were aching with the abuse. But there was one move, a sequence over the overhang, that she thought she could get with a little more effort . . . .

Scully didn't hear Mulder arrive until he was nearly underneath her. Unfortunately, she had chosen that moment to give up on the move: the muscles in her forearms were giving out and she let herself fall without looking below.

"Jesus!" Mulder sprang back in shock as she dropped to the ground in front of him.

She straightened a little stiffly and shook her hands out, then flexed her fingers against each other. "Relax, Mulder. It's just me."

"Right. Who else would tackle me in the dark?" He rustled suspiciously, and she moved backwards a step. But all he was doing was digging around in his knapsack, illuminating his search with a small flashlight clutched between his teeth. Scully kept her distance, suddenly self-conscious of her attire, even in the dark.

Mulder didn't look up at her until he had produced a thin blanket, a box of crackers, and a jar of what looked suspiciously like Cheese-Whiz. He switched off the flashlight and stashed it in the pocket of his jacket.

"So here we are. I brought dinner, in case you didn't eat. Where do you want to do this?" He gestured awkwardly with his arms full of picnic supplies. There were few options; this area was close to the road, and fairly open. On the other hand . . . Scully glanced upwards with half a smile.

Two and a half minutes later, after an argument and some technical scrambling, they were settled in a shallow bowl on the top of the Pebble. The minimal illumination provided by their flashlights would not be seen from the road in this location, and anyone who stumbled across them would certainly think they were lovers out for a romantic evening. Well, until the passerby noticed how far they sat from each other, and the discomfort on their faces.

Scully took off her climbing shoes, grimacing as she straightened out her toes. Her socks and sandals were on the ground below, so she pulled her sweats down over her feet and tried not to think about putting the size four Stingers back on later in order to get down.

They ate quietly for the first few minutes, saving the conversation for later. Mulder had, considerately, brought more than just processed cheese and crackers. Scully finished her apple just as he reached for the bag of Oreos. She snatched them out of his reach.

"No. Not until you tell me why you're here."

The light from her rapidly dying headlamp wasn't enough to show her the color of his eyes; they were as dark as his hair in the dimness. But she expected she knew the expression on his face. It was the same one he had worn when they parted in West Virginia ten weeks ago: affection, pain, and frustration all knotted together.

"I got worried." Mulder looked away, up towards where Glacier Point hung four thousand feet above them in the darkness. Last spring a climber had been killed in a rockfall not far from where they sat. He had been belaying a friend, and realized that if he tried to escape the falling boulders, he would yank his partner off the wall to his death. So he stayed where he was, and was crushed under one hundred tons of Sierra granite. The partner survived: walked away with bruises, and a burden he could never lay down.

Scully began to reach out to Mulder, then hesitated, pulled her hand back and tucked it inside her sleeve. The air was colder now. The sun had been gone from the Valley for hours, and in October at this altitude they might even see snow. "Mulder. Tell me."

"You'd said you would tell me if you moved, but it had been six weeks . . . I wasn't sure you would still be here." He twisted around to fish a bottle out of his knapsack. This one had a screwtop, and was clearly not iced tea.

"Mulder?" This was unexpected; a chill ran down her back despite several layers of high-tech insulation. She moved a little closer to his warmth. Regardless of the weather, Mulder always threw off heat like a well-designed woodstove.

He took his iced tea can, shook it to get the last drops out, and poured a healthy slug of liquor into it. Scully tilted her head to read the label: Glen Morangie. Despite her growing unease, an eyebrow went up and her lips twitched. Trust Mulder to feed her   
bruised apples and Cheese-Whiz, then pull out a fifty-dollar bottle of Scotch for some sort of ritual toast.

The remainder of Scully's root beer was dumped unceremoniously over the side of the boulder as well. She took her can from his hands, and waited. Mulder stared down at the top of the iced tea can, rotated it, as if he were sitting at a bar, gazing into his glass to avoid seeing what was behind him in the mirror.

"Skinner's dead, Scully. They buried him last week."

"What?" He didn't respond. "Oh, no, Mulder, no ---" She rocked forward, wrapped her hands around her cold toes.

Skinner, dead. Skinner, whose broad shoulders and brusque demeanor had belied his inability to protect either himself or his agents from the machinations of the men in the shadows. Skinner, who had tried his best -- but who had come up short half the time. Yet, despite that, he had been their only bulwark.

Scully couldn't say she had liked the man much. He was demanding and difficult, but not contemptuous. She had respected his abilities and his good intentions, and acknowledged his inherent authority. She had fought hard to save him, repeatedly, often despite his own wishes. And despite her own conviction that he might be forced to betray them in the end.

Could she mourn him? Yes. More for what he should have been than for what he was, but for all his weaknesses she had trusted him, after Mulder, more than anyone else in the Bureau.

"Scully?" Mulder gave her sleeve a gentle tug. "You in there?"

She raised her head, wiped her eyes on the sleeve of her jacket. "Yeah. I'm OK, Mulder, it's just -- dammit!" She took a few breaths, blew her nose into the handkerchief that Mulder handed her.

"How did it happen?"

Her flashlight had finally died entirely. So far from the city, the Valley was utterly dark at night and it was impossible to see Mulder's expression. "Car-jacking, they think. He was missing for two days before they found his body in a dumpster in Anacostia. He'd been badly beaten and then shot in the head. His car hasn't turned up."

"Was it -- was it because of us?" Scully didn't think she could bear it if it was. Skinner had covered for them when they realized they had to run this time, had to go so deep no one could find them. Skinner had been one of five people who knew they were still alive -- even her brothers thought she was dead by now.

Mulder's voice was soft in the darkness. "I don't think so. Not directly." Operating more by feel than anything else, he poured them both some more Scotch. "I think he had reached the end of his rope, and instead of hauling him back in, they decided to use him as an example."

Scully shook her head, resisting the certainty in Mulder's voice. It was too convenient, that their only ally with any official credibility would die while they were in no position to help him. If they had stayed in D.C., tried something other than running as fast and as far as they could, perhaps they could have saved him. Instead she spent eight weeks playing the climbing bum while Skinner guarded their backs . . .

"Scully, don't." Mulder's voice had roughened. He put a hand on her shoulder and shook her gently. "Don't do this, Scully. If we'd been there, we would have died, too."

She shrugged off his hand. "How do you *know,* Mulder? How can you just write him off? Maybe we could have done something. Instead he died alone--" Scully caught a great breath, strangled a sob. She was glad it was so dark; she was suddenly shaking with fury and the burden Skinner had laid on them.

Mulder shoved his hands into his pockets. He stared up at the sky for a few moments, then spoke again, his voice low.

"I know because he told me so, Scully."

"What?" She jerked upright and away from Mulder's warmth.

"About a month ago, Skinner sent a message to one of the Hotmail accounts for me. He told me . . . he told me Krycek had a hold on him, but he thought he'd found a chance to break it. He said that it was his risk, and under no circumstances to return to D.C. -- that we could blow it if we turned up. If it worked, he thought he could bring us back in pretty quickly. He didn't say what would happen if it didn't work."

"I guess now we know what would happen." Scully picked up her forgotten soda can, drank a little Scotch too quickly, and it spilled on her jacket.

"Yeah."

Scully took another mouthful of Scotch and rolled it around on her tongue, letting the fumes work their way into her brain and disable the command center. Give her a few minutes and a little more Scotch, and she could work up an unholy rage. Mulder had seen her angry, and he'd seen her drunk. He'd never seen both together.

"Mulder, how could you not tell me this?" She tried to keep the edge out of her voice, but she wasn't entirely successful.

"Scully, how could I tell you? You were god-knows-where doing god-knows-what. You go for *weeks* without checking your email."   
His voice had sharpened, too. They were both too tired, too drunk, and too overwrought for this conversation. But they were having it anyway.

"Oh, that's rich, Mulder." Her voice was as bitter as the sudden rush of bile in the back of her throat. "You're mad at *me* for dropping out of contact? This from the man who regularly disappears on me to follow half-assed leads to kingdom come. This from the man who *demanded* we stay separate, and keep contact to a minimum--" Scully forced herself to stop before she said something unforgivable. How had they come to this so quickly? She had moved entirely away from Mulder, was now hunched three feet away, her hands tucked into her armpits and the soda can balanced precariously between her thighs.

She heard him draw a breath, begin to respond. She waited for the angry words, the justifications to spill out as they had in West Virginia.

But they didn't.

Mulder sat quietly for a long time. Scully waited, and her feet began to get cold, and still he didn't move, or say anything. Uneasy and stiff, she shifted position, and the soda can slipped down, spilling Scotch on her feet and the dry granite of the Pebble. "Shit," she muttered, and tried to dry her feet with her filthy sweats.

"Scully." His voice was distant -- he'd gone away, like he did sometimes during a case.

"Yeah?" She was still angry. She knew that Mulder was Mulder, and keeping her out of the loop was hard-wired in him after six years, but she was never going to like it even when she understood his reasoning.

"You're right," he said. Scully blinked.

He continued, "I should have told you. But I'm right, too -- we couldn't have made a difference." She didn't answer. If Mulder, Skinner's champion when even she had deserted the AD, believed the man's death wasn't preventable, then it probably wasn't. But certainly there was a connection between Skinner's death and the X-Files, even if they didn't know what it was.

Yet another burden to add to the rest, she thought, and moved back towards Mulder. He was probably cold, too, but he had the blanket to sit on. If she was lucky, she could get a corner of it for her feet.

Mulder poured some more Scotch into her can, then shifted over a bit to make room for her on the blanket.

"Do you think our cover's still good?" she asked. It was a safe question, even if that wasn't what she wanted to know. But   
Mulder answered the question she hadn't asked.

"I don't know. Even if he -- talked, Skinner didn't know how to find us, just that we were alive."

It all depended upon whether They thought to ask; one had to assume men who could wipe memories had the ability to encourage testimony. But then why the beating? Like most of the last seven years, it made little sense. Scully tried to think about it, but the Scotch and her cold feet kept distracting her.

"Hey, Scully." She realized several minutes had passed in silence, glanced up to see that Mulder had trained his small   
flashlight on one of her climbing shoes. "You actually fit in these?"

She sighed. Few climbers buy climbing shoes to fit; they buy them up to two sizes smaller than their street shoes, to increase sensitivity and contact with the rock. Her ordinary shoes were small enough: her black-and-yellow climbing shoe looked like a five-year-old's bedtime slipper in the center of Mulder's palm, an oversized bumble bee.

"They actually do fit, yes. They're painful but useful."

"Huh," he grunted, and extended the shoe to her like an offering. "Like the truth. Or some partners I could name."

She took the shoe from him, flexed it between her hands. "Yeah. And once they're broken in, they're a lot more comfortable."

Mulder didn't answer, but he pulled out more of the blanket for her to wrap around her feet. And then poured her some more   
Scotch.

***

They made a sizable dent in the bottle, huddled together against the cold on top of the Pebble. Neither of them suggested finding   
someplace warm; there wasn't anywhere they could go together without taking an unconscionable risk. Eventually they stopped drinking and occasionally talking about Skinner; the wake was over. But they didn't move.

It was very late, but still a long way from dawn. The stars were strange, Scully thought fuzzily. She had rarely been up this   
late anywhere that she could see the stars, and the constellations were unfamiliar. Scully slumped lower, shifting sideways against Mulder until her head was propped up against his chest and she could watch the sky without craning her neck. Now her back was warm but her feet were freezing.

"Comfy, Scully?" She didn't hear Mulder's question so much as feel it through the vibration of his ribcage. She grunted without answering. Telling him her feet were cold would make him want to do something about it, and she didn't want him to move.

The Scotch was making her head spin; looking up at the sky, she could almost feel the earth turning below her. There was a quarter of the sky where there were no stars: that was Glacier Point, she realized, leaning out over the Valley. From this angle it loomed right above them. She considered the possibility that the seven thousand tons of granite nearly a mile above could come loose at any time, calculated the probable velocity at impact. Struck by a sudden sense of vertigo, she flung out an arm for balance, and found Mulder's hand instead.

The vertigo subsided as quickly as it had come. Despite the cold of the night, and the alcohol in his system, Mulder's hand was warm. He wrapped his palm around hers, and rubbed gently at the tape on her fingers, but said nothing. She realized that he was nearly asleep, and thought a bit desperately about the long months of solitary fear before them.

It was still some time until dawn, when they would have to separate. She wanted to stay awake; God only knew when they would stand together in the sunlight again.

"Mulder, what are we going to do now?" *Tell me we're going to be all right.*

Mumbles. "I don't know."

That was ok; they had a little time. And thinking about a plan was preferable to thinking about Skinner in the ground, in the October rain. "Fine. Guess I'll have to save us, then."

"Sounds good to me, Scully. Got a plan?"

"I'm working on it." She wasn't though, not really. She was drifting, thinking about Glacier Point again, and whether their bodies, added to the seven thousand tons of rock above them, would even be noticeable when the tourists came to see the wreckage. It had taken a long time to dig out the belayer's body from the tons of fallen granite.

They would have buried him at Arlington, of course.

Mulder shifted, pulling her back from the edge of sleep.

Lying in the dark, propped against Mulder, still holding his hand, she wondered what that climber had felt, when he understood his friend's sacrifice. But she knew the answer to that; they all did. As she knew the price of that understanding: to accept the burden as the gift it was.

The only way to honor the gift was to keep climbing.

Anchored to earth by Mulder's warmth and the cold granite beneath her, Scully felt as she did at the bottom of a new route up a bare wall: an admixture of joy and terror that caught her breath with exhilaration, and an unspeakable gratitude that she was not alone.

*This is going to be more interesting than Knickerbocker.*

**Author's Note:**

> Note1: In June of 1999, Peter Terbush was belaying Kerry Pyle,   
> who was climbing Apron Jam below Glacier Point when a 100-ton   
> rockfall began above them. Rather than run, and yank his friend   
> off the wall to his death, Peter stayed where he was. Kerry   
> survived; Peter did not. Here's to the heroes, wherever we find   
> them.
> 
> Note2: I prostrate myself to my wonderful betas, Maria Nicole and Maggie McCain. Special thanks to Jesemie's Evil Twin for last-minute reassurances. All three of these generous ladies spent a great deal of their valuable time on a small story in which damned little actually happens. Thanks, folks - drinks (or German-chocolate cake) are on me.


End file.
